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Apparently, nobody’s ever bothered to tell Janet Weiss that, after four or five albums, a band’s best work is supposed to be behind it.

The phenomenally hard-hitting drummer’s thunderous, Bonham-worthy backbeat helped steer Sleater-Kinney into retirement on a breathless high note on 2006’s The Woods, the seminal Portland, Ore., trio’s sixth record. Now she’s at it again, re-pairing with longtime musical foil Sam Coomes in Quasi for a seventh album, American Gong, that makes the rest of the band’s volatile catalogue seem almost sissified.

“It’s probably our most rockin’ record, I would say,” concurs Weiss, whilst ushering her very large dogs – one of whom makes an appearance howling mightily at the end of the new record (“He does it on command,” she boasts. “You wanna hear it?”) — into the house on the eve of Quasi’s latest tour. “We’re just trying to prove that old people have still got it, I guess.”

Indeed they have. American Gong was already turning heads as the finest Quasi record in years — perhaps the finest yet — before Weiss, Coomes and recently added bassist Joanna Bolme made the rounds at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex., last month, handily blowing minds wherever they played with a newly guitar-centric attack that served welcome notice to fans both lapsed and new of the bona fide fireworks this oft-overlooked American indie-rock institution is capable of conjuring.

Quasi has been a reliable purveyor of wonky, tangent-prone punk with a candied pop heart since its Early Recordings collection surfaced in 1996 as the “other” notable outgrowth of a band called Heatmiser’s demise that same year.

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The more widely regarded one, of course, was the solo career of Coomes’ creative partner in that short-lived outfit, a gifted young singer/songwriter by the name of Elliott Smith. While the association has certainly never hurt Quasi — the late Smith memorably took the duo on tour as his opening act and his backing band around the release of XO in 1998 — the fact that Quasi was, for a time, perhaps perceived as playing second fiddle to both Smith and Weiss’s obligations never quite allowed it to attain the profile it probably deserved.

Even these days, Quasi has to steal time to record and to tour away from Weiss and Bolme’s higher-profile gig supporting former Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus in the Jicks. A “natural ebb and flow” is necessarily observed, says Weiss, where “one band sort of gets to monopolize one year and then the other band gets to monopolize the next year.”

All the logistical wrangling with the Jicks has definitely been worth it, in any case. Bolme’s addition to the lineup has brought an impressive new depth and heaviness to the Quasi aesthetic, and audibly pushed the band in a new, almost classic-rock direction on American Gong.

“It’s been great. After 16 years of playing as a two-piece, it seemed like time,” says Weiss.

“It didn’t seem like we had a whole lot to lose. We’ve done this for so long and it’s not like we were rolling in the cash, kicking back on our separate islands. It sounds clichéd, but for us it really is about the music and we wanted to do some new things with the music, have it be more vibrant and alive. And sometimes adding another human is the best way to do that.”

Bolme deserves credit for being so cool-headed in the face of what could have been a thoroughly daunting situation.

“She’s not easily daunted,” says Weiss. “She’s not an easily intimidated person, which is why we love her. She jumped in and turned up real loud and she holds her own with us. Maybe at first she was kind of exploring what her place would be. She was very respectful of what we had going on and, I think, we sort of pushed her to get in there and write something that stands out and walks all over the melody and makes a new melody. Her ideas were really great and we encouraged her to get in there and be an equal.

“In all my favourite bands, you know everybody’s name in the band. It’s not just like: ‘Oh, there’s a bass player that can be replaced.’ Everyone is irreplaceable and it’s about the chemistry and the contrast and how everybody works together and I think she did a really good job of integrating into our world.”

Bolme’s presence has also given Coomes far more room to roam from his typical perch behind the keyboard. One of the more striking things, in fact, about Quasi’s South by Southwest performances was witnessing the reawakening of an inner guitar god few of us realized lurked within.

“When I first met Sam, he was 22 years old and kind of a guitar god then,” laughs Weiss. “It’s just nobody knew it because he started playing keyboards. So Joanna has facilitated that, as well. We liberated Sam from that keyboard. He still plays the keyboard on longer sets, but he’s really been going crazy with the guitar. It’s been fun ... The two-piece always seemed a little skeletal because we’d put bass on the record and then we’d play it live and there’d be this big hole there. So this has really allowed Sam to stretch out on guitar.”

JUST THE FACTS

WHO: Quasi, with Let’s Wrestle.

WHERE: Horseshoe Tavern, 370 Queen St. W.

WHEN: Sunday, 8 p.m.

TICKETS: $10.50 advance from Rotate This, Soundscapes, the Horseshoe or Ticketmaster, $12 at the door.

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